Sisters create design-your-own-shoe online business

Tuesday

Jan 22, 2013 at 6:00 AMJan 23, 2013 at 8:59 AM

By Nicole Laporte THE NEW YORK TIMES

Four years ago, Dorian Howard had one of the most glamorous jobs in the entertainment industry.

“I had the fancy title and the parking spot,” Howard said of being a vice president for production at Paramount, where she oversaw big-budget movies like “The Last Airbender,” from M. Night Shyamalan, and “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.”

But after more than a decade in the film business, Howard, 36, decided to do what a plucky heroine from one of the feel-good dramas that often came across her desk might do: give up everything — or, at least, the fancy title and the parking spot — to follow her dream.

In Howard’s case, that meant starting a business with her sister, Ilissa Howard, 39, in a field where neither had any business experience: fashion.

Make that two fields. Milk & Honey Shoes, their shoe company, which allows women to design their own stilettos and pumps with the click of a mouse, is also an e-commerce business despite the fact that the sisters had zero tech expertise when they began.

“We’re not startup tech kids right out of college,” said Ilissa, who quit her job as a product developer for Toys “R” Us to go into business with her sister.

Perhaps not. But since they started the company in January 2011, sales have doubled and the business has become profitable, Dorian said. She declined to give specific numbers.

Last summer, Milk & Honey was selected by Launchpad LA, a business incubator based here, to participate in its mentorship program, which offers expertise and work space to promising tech startups.

The sisters are proof that having backgrounds that seem far removed from a new business venture can become a strength. Although Dorian jokes that studio executives don’t possess any tangible skills other than having “a Rolodex and an opinion,” her own Rolodex helped her to spread the word about Milk & Honey to high-profile clients.

When actress Ginnifer Goodwin, whom Dorian knows through the entertainment business, wore a pair of Milk & Honey peep-toe platform heels to a Prada book-launch party, fashion websites took notice. The business relationships that Ilissa had with manufacturers in Asia helped her find a factory in China that would produce customized shoes.

“She knew how to make things, and I knew how to sell things. We figured, theoretically, that’s all we need,” Dorian said, sitting next to Ilissa in a white-board-filled conference room at the Launchpad office one recent morning.

The sisters also happen to adore shoes. In college, Ilissa returned from a semester in Florence, Italy, with 17 pairs. It was this love, combined with the frustration of not always being able to find the shoes they wanted, that led to the idea for their company.

Ilissa, slender and 5-foot-9, says she has always struggled to find heels that don’t make her feel like a giraffe. And Dorian says that she was once “standing in the Saks department store in New York City, which has its own ZIP code, and I couldn’t find what I was looking for.”

So why not create a company where “you’re no longer stuck with the options that the ladies footwear buyer from a department store provides for you?” Dorian said. “You want that 3-inch, raised, suede pump? We’ll make it for you.”

The huge growth of e-commerce, and the success of the online shoe company Zappos, fueled their decision to create not just a shoe company but an Internet-based one.

Then came the matter of building it. First, Ilissa met with cobblers in Hong Kong who helped her create a model for making customized shoes in a “scalable way,” Dorian said. In other words, the designs could not be so complicated and different from one another that orders would be hard to fill one by one.

Then the women worked with tech teams to build a website that allows shoppers to assemble their shoes on a screen. After selecting the basic model (pump, loafer, wedge, etc.), customers can pick a material and color (say, red pressed snakeskin), add features like a back strap, and pick a heel height. A representative is available to answer questions online or by telephone.

Customers can also make an appointment to try on shoe samples at the Milk & Honey showroom in Los Angeles. And yes, the company accepts returns.

None of this comes cheap, however. The shoes and boots range from $190 to $310.

Meghan Cleary, the author of “Shoe Are You?,” a guide to women’s shoes and what they say about their wearers, says customized shoes is a “niche market” that is growing.

“Customers are really demanding something specialized, made just for them, or tailored just for them,” she said. “So Milk & Honey, along with a few other companies like Shoes of Prey, really tap into that.”

Even big shoe companies, like Converse and Nike, allow customers to come up with new variations of, say, the Converse All Star.

The Howard sisters certainly have high hopes for the future of customized fashions. Having used savings from their previous careers to finance their startup, they are now looking for investors.

How is the pitch process going?

“I love it,” Dorian said. “I spent my entire career selling my passion. For me, it used to be screenplays and movies. Now it just turned into shoes.”